Donald Trump’s cognitive decline has a soundtrack. It includes the Village People’s “YMCA.,” Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain,” and Elvis Presley’s “An American Trilogy.” Don’t try to find a theme among the musical numbers. There isn’t one.
The only commonality is that they were played Monday at a Trump town hall event in Oaks, Pa., where after just five questions and a program disruption caused by two audience members fainting (the room was reportedly hot), the former president declared, “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music.”
It was then that the man who never stops talking stopped talking. The next 39 minutes provided the starkest picture yet of Trump’s waning mental acuity, set to a playlist hastily deployed by his team.
The former president swayed, stared, paced, bobbed and punched the air while South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who was meant to be moderating the Q&A session, tried to play along. She raised her arms to form the first letter of the “YMCA” dance — a staple on wedding reception dance floors since the 1980s — but it appeared Trump had no idea what she was doing, and he continued to sway to the beat of his own drum machine.
His team later tried to spin the disaster at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center as a “total lovefest!” “Everyone was so excited they were fainting so @realDonaldTrump turned to music,” wrote Trump campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, in a post on X. Team Trump offered no explanation for why Trump encouraged his audience of supporters to vote on Jan. 5 — two months after election day.
The “total lovefest” kicked off a week filled with extreme examples of his deteriorating ability to reason, even in Trump terms … and it’s only Wednesday.
As other columnists and political reporters have pointed out, we’re running out of ways to describe the Mad-King slippage of Trump, and we shouldn’t have to at this point. The proof is in countless hours of MAGA rally footage, radio and podcast appearances, and reams of his own musings across social media. There’s no shortage of accessible documentation showing the 78-year-old’s slide from strategically unpredictable to perilously incoherent.
But believing what’s right in front of our eyes is not enough since U.S. politics as usual began flirting with fascism, making reality a subjective thought experiment from which we can pick and chose our preferred truths. Now here we are, less than three weeks out from what’s predicted to be one of the closest elections ever, watching one of the candidates melt down to nonfunctional levels.
And I get it. I’d rather be writing about anything else at this point because I’m also sick of hearing about Trump’s “unhinged” behavior. But to ignore his decline is like failing to send out storm warnings or wildfire alerts. But this impending national disaster is the man-made sort.
Trump did use his words Tuesday in a one-on-one interview with Bloomberg News editor in chief John Micklethwait, but given the general incoherence of his answers, he may as well have been shuffling around aimlessly to Luciano Pavarotti’s version of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” (they played it twice at Monday’s town hall).
Micklethwait asked if Google should be broken up. Trump sighed then gave this non-answer: “I just haven’t gotten over something the Justice Department did yesterday, where Virginia cleaned up its voter rolls and got rid of thousands and thousands of bad votes. And the Justice Department sued them, that they should be allowed to put those bad votes, those illegal votes back in and let the people vote. So I haven’t gotten over that. A lot of people have seen that, and they can’t even believe it.”
Micklethwait interjected, “The question was about Google, President Trump.”
Trump responded, “You’ve got to be able to finish a thought because it’s very important. This is big stuff.”
Micklethwait: “You’ve gone from the dollar to [French President Emmanuel] Macron.”
Trump: “It’s called the weave. It’s all these different things happening.”
Wednesday’s pretaped softball town hall hosted by Fox News and moderated by Harris Faulkner allowed Trump a reprieve from the damning exposure of truly damaging live events and the increasing difficulty he has answering basic policy questions that he deems are hostile and unfair. He’s scheduled to then host a high-dollar fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, where the aging candidate will likely say something that should disqualify him from rerunning for office, but it won’t.
He already called his opponent, VP Kamala Harris, “retarded” in front of wealthy donors at a dinner in New York. The comment barely dented the news-o-sphere. Everything seems minor after the incitement of a coup. Everything about his deviant behavior feels like old news.
But it’s worth repeating because it’s important: Trump is not fit to be president. He’s not just a wacky guy swaying to his own tune. He is an existential threat bent on toppling democracy, no matter if it’s wrapped in a Village People tune.